First, we are acutely aware of the UX pain this is causing and we are sorry for this. We are trying to undo a decade and a half of systems divergence. There are literally hundreds of different engineering teams across Microsoft involved in this effort. So this is taking time.

Second, we can’t easily “merge” two accounts, or allow IT to “take over” personal Microsoft accounts. There are two main hurdles: (1) The terms of service are fundamentally different for the two account types and (2) they are based on different technologies with different stacks (different identifiers, SDKs, token formats, etc.). We’re working to converge the two stacks but again this takes time. There are details of this in the blog post linked above.

Third, in the past year we’ve worked with 70+ teams across Microsoft that operate business services but only supported MSA for historical reason. Our goal is for all of these apps to support Azure AD (work accounts) as well. As of Nov 2017, we’re about half way there. Dev Center and MSDN subscriptions (now called Visual Studio subscriptions) are example of apps that now support Azure AD. Microsoft Payment Central and Invoicing are a few weeks away. Volume Licensing and many others are in progress and a couple months away.

The best recommendations we can provide right now are:
1) Use your work account (in Azure AD) to access any work application that supports it.
2) If you had created a personal Microsoft account to access Microsoft business apps, and no longer need it, close the account. Or rename it (which means chancing the user id) to avoid confusion.

First, we are acutely aware of the UX pain this is causing and we are sorry for this. We are trying to undo a decade and a half of systems divergence. There are literally hundreds of different engineering teams across Microsoft involved in this effort. So this is taking time.

Second, we can’t easily “merge” two accounts, or allow IT to “take over” personal Microsoft accounts. There are two main hurdles: (1) The terms of service are fundamentally different for the two account types and (2) they are based on different technologies with different stacks (different identifiers, SDKs, token formats, etc.). We’re working to converge the two stacks but again this…

Thanks for the feedback. We’re working on this. We started with the top bar, then added favorites, and continued by shrinking the list of resources after opening the resource blade. Much more is in the works — all based on your feedback. Keep it coming and, in the meantime, we’ll keep working on this to streamline the experience for you.

Native Azure Storage support for using SSL to access blobs at custom domains is still on our backlog. We would love to hear about your scenarios where using the Azure CDN is not an acceptable solution, either by posting on this thread or sending us an email at azurestoragefeedback@microsoft.com.